


Sunsets

by aloislanz



Category: The Colony (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-19
Updated: 2009-12-19
Packaged: 2017-10-04 16:22:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,012
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/32143
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aloislanz/pseuds/aloislanz
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There's smoke on the horizon, but that's nothing new.  Joey returns to Los Angeles.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sunsets

**Author's Note:**

  * For [delurker](https://archiveofourown.org/users/delurker/gifts).



> Of all the fandoms I offered, this was the last one I expected to get assigned to, and possibly even the last one you expected to read. It was strange to be in their world, but I hope you're getting everything that you asked for. Merry Christmas from your Yuletide Writer.

There's smoke on the horizon, but that's nothing new. Since the collapse, Joey can't count a single day when some part of Los Angeles hasn't been on fire. It's a little different, knowing that the black plumes are most likely rising out of the still smoldering marauder battle-wagon, God bless John C and his kick-ass flame thrower, but anyone else looking would just see another example of man's willingness to turn against each other in a crisis.

The car is starting to vibrate dangerously under his hands, that God he's so close to home, and it's the one time Joey wishes that maybe he wasn't driving into the heart of L.A. on his own, that maybe he should have asked John V to come with him, someone who knows how to make things that move, but that feeling doesn't last. John V's a nice guy, they're all nice people, but Joey wouldn't trust any of them to have his back in a fight. And that's what he plans to do here. He's gonna fight the bastards.

Joey stops the car in front of the gate that still has SANCTUARY scrawled across it, and tries not to think about the irony. He takes the key with him, and after a second thought, reaches under the steering wheel and pulls on a fistful of wires. It'll be easy enough for him to fix if he ever needs to use it again, but seeing the missing connections might just be enough to discourage anyone from stealing it.

The warehouse is right where he left it, and in the hours he's been gone, it doesn't look like anyone's moved in. The battle wagon fire has mostly died, skinny tendrils of smoke rising up to the fog from the parts of the body of the truck still glows bright orange in the yard. There's a heavy stench in the air that suggests that someone was still in the thing when they hit it with the flame, and Joey almost feels bad about that, until he remembers where that truck was heading, and how much damage the person behind the wheel was intending to do. He promises himself that tomorrow, after the fire has died and the metal has cooled completely, he'll go through the wreckage, see if he can find any remains, and give whoever it was something close to a proper burial. It's more than Andre or any of his pals deserves, but as far as Joey's concerned, it's just another mark the "Hero" column for him.

The warehouse itself is pretty trashed, but that's not surprising, considering they just drove their own battle-wagon through it. Tables are overturned, the radio is pretty much destroyed, and there are dark tire marks in the middle of the floor, but Mike's generator is still intact, so he can at least turn on a light when the sun goes down. There's no lock on the big door facing the street any more, but he might be able to get away with that tonight, if Andre and the other marauders think the whole group of them are heading south, that the warehouse is completely abandoned. It's more of a risk than he'd normally be willing to take, but he doesn't have enough sunlight left to find the right materials to make the door secure again.

A look through the pantry leaves him feeling better than before. There's enough food left behind to feed a single person for at least a week and a half, enough clean water to last just as long, if not a little longer, and the best thing he's seen all day is the bottle of brandy he'd forgotten they had. Holding the bottle now, he remembers picking it up when they stopped to raid that department store, how he'd hid it under the bottom shelf, not telling anyone it was there, hoping to surprise them all sometime in the future. In the midst of everything that came after – Andre and Elizabeth, George disappearing, his kidney stones, Mike being an asshole about everything – he'd forgotten it.

He puts it back on the shelf with a promise to celebrate with it. Sooner rather than later.

He's out doing one final sweep of the compound's yard when he hears the crash behind him, and he turns just in time to see a figure stumble out from behind the scrap wood pile. He's got a metal bar in his hands faster than he can shout, and it's over his head and ready to swing before he recognizes the bright blue eyes and dark curly--

"Holy shit, George." And it is George, thinner than he last saw him, and still wearing the clothes he disappeared in. There are shallow cuts across his face and holes in his T-shirt, and Joey realizes he must have been trying to get safely over the barbed wire on the fence when he fell. "Where the hell have you been, man?"

George shakes his head. "I don't know. But I heard them talk about getting back the warehouse, and when they all left, I started running. I followed the smoke." The fading light of the sunset digs deeper circles under George's eyes, and in the orange glow Joey can see a dark ring of bruises around George's arms, reaching up into the sleeves of his t-shirt. For a second, he's confused, because he can't figure out who else would want to get at the warehouse, unless -

"Wait, were you with Andre?" George presses his lips together in a thin line that doesn't deny Andre's involvement, that says he doesn't want to talk about it, and to be honest, Joey isn't sure he wants to know. Andre's a vicious bastard, the biggest guy he's seen since he's been here, and who clearly knows how to hold a grudge like a champ. By the look of George, he's also not the kind of guy who pulls his punches, figuratively and literally.

"Where is everyone?" George is looking around now, angling his head to peak inside the warehouse, clearly confused as to why no one else has come running out to welcome him home.

"They went south."

"You didn't go with them?" Joey tries not to hear the question underneath that, the question he knows George wants to ask, the one that asks why they were going to leave without him.

"I started to, but I came back. I couldn't leave my city like this. I can help." George smirks, an ugly look that doesn't quite work on his face, and crosses his arms over his chest.

"So what, Superman, you're going to save L.A.? All by yourself?" Joey smiles, and throws an arm around George's shoulders as he leads him back into the warehouse.

"Not any more."

* * *

"So, kidney stones, huh?" It's a shared dinner of Cup O' Noodles and a can of peaches, and they pass the two between themselves. George has found a sweater, some huge thing of Mike's left behind in the rush to escape. The sleeves are way too long (Joey's already forgotten just how *big* Mike is), and the cuffs keep falling into the can. There's a little wet ring around one of George's wrists, probably sticky, and smelling of peaches.

"Oh my God, man. Pain like you don't know."

"I am a doctor, Joey. I know a little something about pain. Allison take care of you?" It's weird. They only parted ways that morning, but all Joey can remember of Allison is a little blonde bobble-head tottering around on her little legs, with the sound of her voice following behind her. And if he had to describe her to a stranger, that might be enough to pick her out of a line-up, but if they asked for details, he'd be stuck. Her face, the length of her hair, the color of her eyes - they're all giving way to fuzzy memories. He's surprised to find it's like that with everyone. He can remember little things - Vlad's ponytail, Amy's hands, the sound Lelani makes when she's kicking Andre in the face - and he can even remember a little something of their dispositions. But the things that made them real, the things that made the individual, those things are slipping away with the setting sun, and if he's totally honest, Joey's not entirely sad to see them go. And maybe that was always the problem.

"As much as Allison takes care of anything. She's a nice girl, but she can be such a bitch."

"Nice girl, nice guys." There's that smirk again. That ugly, mean quirk of the lips that doesn't fit on the face of a capital N Nice Guy like George. "If everybody's so nice, why are you still here?" He's a bit surprised that George is bringing this up again - after all, if George is allowed to Not Talk About his recent past, then shouldn't Joey be allowed to keep something of himself to himself? So he repeats himself, deflects.

"I told you. This is my city. It didn't feel right, leaving it behind." It's weaker to hear it a second time, and George sees right through his plastic defenses.

"Yeah. That's very noble of you. Why are you really here?" George is gesturing at him with a peach on the end of a spork, and the both of them, George and the peach, are looking very accusatory. It's distracting, almost to the point where Joey forgets his lie.

"I don't know what you-"

"Oh, come on. It wasn't that long ago that you were itching for a way out of this shit hole like everyone else. You had the chance to get out, so why did you stay behind?" And he doesn't know what to say. Or rather, he does know, but he doesn't know how to say it. He could say, 'I don't trust them,' but then he might have to explain why, might have to confront the fact that he doesn't have a good reason, might have to explain that he just doesn't trust people in general, that it's easier to play the loner, to let everyone think they've got his number than try to convince them otherwise.

He could say, 'I didn't want to get hurt,' but he knows that's a lie, that he's already hurt. Why else would he wear his prison time like a banner, to be the first to point out his past transgressions, if not to have total control of his own reputation? Even his first story, 'I don't want to fail my city,' is a lie, because he already failed his city. He spent six years failing his city.

He could say nothing. Shut his trap and eat his noodles, end the conversation now and ignore it if it ever comes up again. Start building that wall again, higher and stronger than before, close himself off to this guy who just wants to help. But he respects George more than that, he might even respect himself more than that, so he says the only thing he can think of:

"I don't want to be remembered for my bad decisions." And maybe there's more to it than that. Maybe he has more to say, but he doesn't know how to say it. And maybe George has an opinion on that, too, but it looks like maybe he's forgotten it in favor of his peaches. And maybe its enough, for now. For ever. Maybe it doesn't have to be anything more than what it is. It's more honest than Joey's been in a long time, with himself or anyone else, and he thinks that maybe that's all it has to be.

The rest of their meal is silent. But good.

* * *

There isn't a window in his loft, so he doesn't know how long the sun's been down when he hears the rumble of the street-side door sliding open in the warehouse down below. He immediately thinks of George, alone downstairs in a room with too many mattresses, in no condition to fight off an attacker. As he slides across the dirty floor to press his ear against his door, he sends the loudest mental waves he can of Hide, George. Hide.

The words are muffled through the wood and metal, but he can just make voices, two of them.

" -ling you, he's not gonna be here."

"Of course he's going to be here. Where else is he gonna go?" The first voice is unfamiliar, but he recognizes the second voice instantly. Andre. Shit.

"Georgie!" Andre's deep voice calls, echoing off the empty walls of the warehouse. "Georgie Porgie pudding an' pie!" The second voice says something too soft for Joey to hear, but the laugh it pulls out of Andre is dark and dangerous enough for him to guess he doesn't want to know. The voices trail off into some dark corner of the warehouse, and for several long, heartbreaking minutes, the only thing Joey can hear is his own breath against the door. The sound of his pulse is so loud in his ear that he nearly misses the voices when they do return, and he presses his ear harder against the door, straining to hear a sign of struggle, a sign of George.

"-be he got lost? Or saw it empty and ran off after them?"

"Maybe. 'S no big deal. If we find 'em, great for us. If we don't, we don't."

"We gonna move every one down here, now?"

"Prob'ly not. The other place has..." The voices disappear outside, and a heartbeat later Joey hears two motorcycle engines kick up in the street below. He listens to them rumble down the street, waits for the noise to trickle down to a distant roar, waits until he can't hear them at all anymore, then waits some more, straining for any noise, any sign that the motorcycles are doubling around, that they killed the engines around the corner and walked back, that Andre sent his toady on ahead of him and is down there, standing in the doorway, waiting for someone, anyone, George, to show his face.

When he's absolutely certain that there's nothing to hear anymore, Joey reaches up to the handle and slowly, so fucking slowly, pushes the door open, wincing at every scream of the rusty hinges. It's hard to see the scaffolding to get a foot hold, and he hits the ground harder than his knees would like on any other day. Maybe he'll care in the morning. But not now.

George isn't in what they're still calling the bedroom, and a quick run through the pantry shows it decidedly George-less, and minus several packages of ramen and at least one gallon jug of water, though they must not have seen the brandy, because it's still there, tucked away on the bottom shelf. He doesn't think George is dumb enough to hide out in the compound yard or the big room, but he checks both places, just in case. After an hour it feels like he's scoured every inch of the main floor of the warehouse, so the only place left to check is the bathroom.

It still stinks in there, but there's enough of the moonlight coming in through a window on the far wall that he can at least see where he's going. He can't see George, but he can hear the quiet, desperate breaths of someone trying very hard not to be heard. He walks down the long line of empty stalls until he reaches the last one, the one with it's door shut just enough that he can't quiet see what's inside.

As carefully as possible, Joey pushes against the stall door, and there's George, perched up on the back of the toilet, eyes screwed shut and pushing himself as far into the wall as possible. Somehow, here in the starkness of the moonlight, Joey can see the bruises better, how dark they are against George's pale skin, and he can see the dangerous story they tell, the trail of darkly purple hand and fingerprint shapes that travel down his chest, circle his waist, and dip below the waistband of his boxers.

Joey doesn't know what to do, doesn't know how close is too close and how far is abandonment, so he compromises with a hand on George's shoulder, trying for a gentle, reassuring squeeze to comfort the shaking man. For his part, George rolls in, way into Joey's personal space, hides his face against Joey's chest, close enough that Joey can feel the sticky leftovers of tears, and every hot, stuttering breath against his bare torso as George struggles to calm himself.

They stay that way for a long time.

When the sun rises, he and George move one of the extra mattresses up into the loft.

* * *

Three days pass without incident, and it serves him right for thinking that they might just get through the week unbothered. And when the banging does start early one morning, it's so fast and so violent and paired with so much screaming that Joey, for a split second, thinks they might be under attack, that the marauders are back with the really big guns this time, that shit is about to get really fucking real.

It turns out, it's just one guy, some skinny bastard with a mess of curly black hair and a sorry excuse for a beard, and he's slapping the metal siding so hard his palm is starting to bleed. A couple of feet away a woman crouches and leans against the wall with her arms wrapped around her knees. When the guy stops shouting long enough to breath, Joey can hear her whimpering softly. The guy hardly notices the quick stream of blood dripping down his hand, and every time she makes a noise, he hits harder.

"What's going on out here, guys?' The guy looks up at him in his perch, and even from the distance, Joey can see he's been crying. The guy rubs his eyes, leaving bright red smears across his cheeks.

"This is where the doctor is, right? You gotta help us, man!" The way he says it, it sounds like the guy is going to start climbing the walls if Joey doesn't come down and open the door right this second.

"Hey, calm down, alright?" The last thing they need is some hysterical nut-job drawing attention to the warehouse. "Why don't you tell me what's going on, and maybe-"

"Some guy on a motorcycle hit her with a bat. She won't stop bleeding." The guy reaches down, tries to pull the woman to her feet, but when she starts to uncurl, she screams, short and wet, and falls back against the wall, and Joey can see that her arms weren't wrapped around her knees. She was holding her belly. Her very pregnant belly.

Shit.

Five minutes later, and Joey's rolling the door open while George drops down from the loft, pulling a shirt over his head and rubbing the sleep from his eyes. It takes all three of them to carry the woman up to the makeshift clinic (two and a half, if you count the guy's bloody hand), and it's after Joey's brought up three gallons of clean water that George catches him by the arm.

"Keep him distracted," he says, nodding to the curly-haired guy, who's just now seemed to discover the long bloody gash across his palm and is staring, horrified, at the red blood dripping across white skin. "Take him for a walk, play a game of checkers, I don't care. Just keep him out of this room."

Joey looks past George at the woman carefully laid out on table. There's a sorry mix of tools that, if he squints, look like they could be medical supplies, some probably salvaged from the disastrous hospital run, though most of them look like they were picked up inside the warehouse. "What are you thinking?"

"I'm thinking that whatever I'm gonna do, I'm gonna have to do it in an unsterile environment without any kind of anesthesia, and I don't want to have him in here listening to her scream. As it is, I'll be lucky if I only lose one of them." Joey nods, and leaves, grabbing the curly-haired guy by the wrist, and walking him across the floor of the warehouse, as far from the clinic as he can possibly get.

It turns out that curly-haired guy is named Steven, and the girl is Sharon, and they were hoping for a little girl, named Sarah. Joey learns all this as he wraps the guy's hand in the cleanest muslin he can find. They'd been in Portland when the world went to shit, and started walking to L.A. as soon as they could, hoping they could meet up with a couple of Sharon's cousins before moving inland. That was before they realized Sharon was pregnant. They were lucky enough to fall in with a big group from Seattle trying to get to Las Vegas, and got as far as Fresno before splitting, but had heard about a safe community growing south of Los Angeles. Joey nods, because he remembers where that is, and is halfway through giving the guy the co-ordinates, before he realizes what he's hearing. Or rather, what he isn't hearing.

The guy is looking past him, looking up at the makeshift clinic with all the hope of a man who knows he should know better. Joey turns to follow his gaze, and sees the outline of George in the window, white as a ghost and up to his elbows in red. Heavy silence weighs down the floor of the warehouse, broken only by the sound of Steven's horrified cry.

* * *

He finds George on the roof later, after he's helped curly-haired Steven wrap Shannon and Sarah and put the bodies into the back of the hack-saw car as respectfully as possible. Joey sends that broken family off with the keys, a set of directions hastily written in the margins of a newspaper, and a promise that the thing can, in fact, drive through the L.A. river, but he doesn't know how much the guy is hearing any more. He just takes the keys with a heavy sort of silence, and disappears around the corner with the falling sun flashing bloody reds and yellows in the rusting metal.

George has brought the brandy with him, and he passes the bottle wordlessly to Joey when he sits down beside him, shielding his eyes against the brightness of the setting sun.

"You did what you could, man," he says, taking a healthy mouthful of the drink, and George smiles that special sort of doctor smile, where the acceptance of the reality doesn't quite wipe away the lines of worry and pain from the corners of their eyes.

"Yeah. I did what I could." They sit in silence for a long while, passing the bottle between them, watching the clouds glow pinker while the sky grows darker.

"I'm gonna put a really big fucking lock on that door first thing tomorrow morning," he says, finally, but George shakes his head.

"Don't. You want to save Los Angeles? This is how you do it. On person at a time." George stands, brave with the strength of alcohol in his veins, and waves a hand towards the yard below them. "There's a wall down there that says 'Sanctuary' on it, and when the sun rises tomorrow, someone's going to see it, and someone else after them, and they're going to come to us. So we've got to be here." And Joey believes it, he really does. Here in the dying light of a shitty day at the end of a truly shitty week, George is still optimistic, and if after all he's been through George can still have hope, then maybe Joey can be hopeful, too, and mean it.

In the meanwhile, there's time for one more smokey sunset, and tomorrow the sun rises on heroes.


End file.
